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Re: The Science-y Stuff Thread

Woah this is very cool...

Sustainable Energy Breakthrough? A University of Colorado Boulder research team has moved closer to what some call the Holy Grail of a sustainable hydrogen economy, splitting water with sunlight. http://oak.ctx.ly/r/9ut3

Re: The Science-y Stuff Thread

Was reading a study conducted in brittain. Apparently 1 in 5 men in the UK has low sperm count and the trend is on the rise. Projections made could point to the vast majority of men being infertile or needing the recourse of in-vitro ferilization in as little as 4-5 generations from now.

Conspiracy theorists, converge! Weeding out the common man for selective breeding of bio-engineered supermen? Maybe Energy drinks really aren't that good for you? Matt Damon??

Re: The Science-y Stuff Thread

I just finished reading that article a few minutes ago! Such a crazy (but plausible) idea; to move only the space-time around the ship in order to create a 'pocket' or 'bubble' of space-time which will be singularly transported faster than the speed of light. I like the detergent/bubble analogy that the guy provides in the video, too. It's food for thought, surely.

Re: The Science-y Stuff Thread

Just last night I saw an interview with a nationally renowned meteorologist who said the worst tornado in US history was 2.5 miles wide with winds up to 300 mph -- and the storm discussed in this link was even worse and lasted for months. Whew!

Re: The Science-y Stuff Thread

Although this one portrays it in a positive light, I really hate the comparison of science to religion. It makes it so simple for a religious person to refute science by saying ''I have faith in the bible, you have faith in Darwin...it's equal and you're just as dogmatic as I am''....

Science is cummulative. Everything is a theory until we realize that we need a new theory to better explain our observations. this allows for paradigm shifts in our understanding of everything. It's peer reviewed and deconstructed for sources of bias.

Religion is based on a book (or text of some kind) has no corrolation to anything outisde it's body of text and, for the most part, remains unchanged. In fact, any small changes in the interpretation usually leads to the formation of another religion as rigid as the last one.

Simply put, if tomorrow it was discovered that the big bang theory was incorrect in favour of a new theory which allowed for a better explanation for what we can observe, then scientists would eventually test and ascribe to that theory.. This never happens with Religion.

Re: The Science-y Stuff Thread

Also, I disagree that science has been typically viewed as amoral. I think there has been a lot of work done in Biology to explain why morality is important to social behaviour and how, in the long run, it's evolutionarily better to be altruisic than to not be.

Dr. Michael Schermer wrote some really entertaining books about the science of good and evil...all of it points to that theory.

Re: The Science-y Stuff Thread

I agree that they are two completely different things....I don't like Science being compared to Religion and I don't like Religion trying to sound like Science...if you have faith in your religion, then nothing I say can touch you. I've got tons of religious friends, christians, buddhists, muslim...we can have fun and respectful discussions.

Re: The Science-y Stuff Thread

A good percentage of scientists self-report themselves as being religious. Their answer to "how do you rectify science and religion?" is that there is nothing contradictory. The folks that view old stories as factual as opposed to allegories can't reconcile the differences.

Re: The Science-y Stuff Thread

Lol....I'm not biting.

But I'm an athiest...it means I don't believe in any God, and I don't have a requirement to fill that ''void'' in my life with anything else. It doesn't mean I'm not spiritual and it doesn't mean that Science is my religion...Science is just a vast spectrum of knowledge. there's lots of stuff we don't know yet and there's no shame in admitting we don't know. Even the existence of a God...However, I base my personal opinion on preponderance of evidence.

Commander Terry Wilcutt guided Atlantis to a landing at 2:56 am Central time( 19 September 2000, 07:56 UTC), wrapping up a 4.9 million mile mission in which more than three tons of equipment were delivered to the international outpost. Wilcutt and his crewmates, Pilot Scott Altman and Mission Specialists Ed Lu, Rick Mastracchio, Dan Burbank, Yuri Malenchenko and Boris Morukov completed the 23rd consecutive landing of a shuttle at the Florida spaceport, and the 30th landing of a shuttle at the Cape in the last 31 flights.

The first initial amateur radio station was flown on board the space shuttle Atlantis on STS-106. The crew transferred the ham radio gear into the space station for future use by the Expedition One crew.